“A hundred percent, yeah. I told her every day.”
“Did those delusions focus on one individual?”
“No, I guess the focal point of her delusions was obviously my father. But there’s always something she’s been delusional about for as long as I can remember [that] my father was a double agent for the Israeli intelligence.”
This idea of Susan’s delusions was the focal point of O’Connor’s argument that she should not be allowed out on bail. Focusing on her delusions about Felix’s involvement with Israeli intelligence, her belief that the Briners were embezzling her money, and statements she made about the “Jewish Network,” O’Connor sought to portray Susan as a woman whose mental state was a risk to those around her.
On cross-examination, Susan’s public defender, Jack Funk, an associate of Peter Coleridge, designed his questioning of Adam to convey that Susan’s delusions had a singular focus on Felix. Susan’s delusional behavior did not make her a threat to the public at large, it made her a threat to Felix. Since he was no longer alive, Susan no longer posed a risk to the public.
“During your lifetime… do you know of any other time in which your mother has attacked or threatened any other person?”
“No.”
“And do you have any reason to believe that if your mother were released, upon whatever appropriate security, that she would threaten or attack any other person?”
“I believe the only answer I can give to that question is, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a fair question to ask me because I don’t know what happened in the cottage that night…. My honest opinion on my mom is that she is an 80 percent sane and rational person and she’s 20 percent delusional, and that 20 percent is completely unpredictable. There’s no way for anybody to know what’s going to happen next, and that’s why I think she needs to be getting help somewhere…. She should not be in prison. She should be getting help somewhere so she can come out and be a fully functional member of society.”
Shortly after the hearing in September 2004, Judge O’Malley set bail for Susan at $1,050,000, but Susan’s time on the outside was brief. Within seven months of posting the monies, she was back behind bars at the West County Detention Facility for violating the terms of her release.
On October 6, 2004, Adam filed a “wrongful death civil suit” against Susan seeking $1 million dollars in damages in addition to other declaratory relief. Eli Polk and Felix’s twin brother, John, who was executor of the Polk estate, were named as codefendants in the suit. Andrew and Jennifer Polk declined to participate in the legal action, according to the court papers.
“As a result of the intentional wrongful death of their father, Plaintiffs Adam and Gabriel suffer damages by way of lost love, care, comfort, and support of their father, in an amount no less than $1 million, to be proven at trial,” the suit read.
In addition to monetary compensation, Gabe and Adam were seeking declarations from the court that John Polk be named proper trustee of the Trust and that Susan have “no right, title, or interest in Trust, which may be funded by assets having a net total value of $1 million dollars.” Furthermore “‘upon conviction of murder or finding of felonious and intentional killing’ that Susan have no property right or interest in the Estate of Felix Polk or in any asset enumerated in the 1996 Polk Trust, and that she have no right or interest in Felix’s share of any community property asset, including Felix’s pension plan and the Orinda residence at 728 Miner Road.”
As a condition of her bail, Judge O’Malley set a no contact order forbidding Susan from having any contact with her son Gabriel, Dan and Marjorie Briner, Felix’s friend Barry Morris, and family lawyer Bud McKenzie. Despite harsh warnings about the repercussions of contacting any of these individuals, upon learning of the filing, Susan sent a flurry of letters to her sons. Although Gabriel refused to respond to her, Susan sent him twenty-four e-mails during this time. Her actions landed her back in jail at the West County Detention Facility in April 2005 with $5 million bail.
Susan told the court that she was simply responding to the civil suit when she contacted her youngest son via e-mail. In a letter to the court, she railed at Judge O’Malley’s April 19 decision to revoke her bail, claiming she had written to Gabriel only after her lawyers, Peter Coleridge and Jack Funk, advised her that the no contact order did not apply to legal correspondence.
“However, I was charged with 24 counts of contempt of court for 24 e-mails to Gabriel and reincarcerated and placed on a no bail hold by Judge Mary Ann O’Malley,” Susan complained in the letter.
Susan subsequently fired Peter Coleridge in May 2005, and announced her intent to act as her own counsel. Since her arrest, she had fired all three of her criminal attorneys—William Ousterhadt, Elizabeth Grossman, and now Peter Coleridge—supposedly because of disagreements over the handling of her defense. She had repeatedly refused to entertain an “insanity” defense or one using “battered woman syndrome.” She had spent much of her life running from a diagnosis of mental illness and she wasn’t about to hide behind such a claim now.
Susan would represent herself pro per. In an interview with the Contra Costa Times in the summer of 2005, she told the newspaper that she was convinced she was not going to get the defense she wanted unless she represented herself. “If I’m going to lose when represented by counsel, I might as well represent myself,” she was quoted as saying. “At least I’ll give them a fight.”
While self-representation is not a good idea for any defendant, in Susan’s case it was a particularly bad choice. In Contra Costa County, women who choose to represent themselves are at a severe disadvantage in comparison to their male counterparts. The women who are housed in the West County Detention Facility are not permitted to use the jail’s “Male Only” law library, despite many administrative complaints from defendants facing felony charges. This restriction greatly limits the amount of research that they can undertake on their own.
This fact may have played a role in the abrupt change Susan announced in late July 2005 when she asked a judge to appoint Oakland defense attorney, Daniel Horowitz, to her case. Horowitz had gained notoriety as a TV legal analyst during the Scott Peterson murder trial by stationing himself at the courthouse to offer legal commentary to cable stations in need of a sound bite. He soon became a regular on Court TV, providing analysis for the Peterson case and later in the Michael Jackson molestation trial.
Representing Susan Polk at her upcoming murder trial would be another opportunity for the lawyer to grab the media spotlight. While Horowitz had represented more than one dozen defendants in capital murder cases during his two decades as an attorney, the majority of his practice was at the Federal level, involving white-collar crimes such as money laundering and embezzlement.
According to his attorney profile, Horowitz was “a defense attorney with an extensive computer and business background” and 90 percent of his practice was devoted to litigation. Nevertheless, he was anxious to take Susan’s case to trial. In August, he asked Judge Thomas Maddock to allow him to bring his cocounsel, Ivan W. Golde, on board for the case. Judge Maddock agreed, under the condition that the county pay only Horowitz’s fee.
While Horowitz was lead counsel on the case, it was Ivan who actually persuaded Susan to meet with them. He made the initial contact while visiting a client at the West County Detention Facility where Susan was being held. During their brief conversation, Ivan convinced Susan to sit down with him and his partner, Dan, to discuss her case.
Born and raised in San Francisco’s East Bay, Golde followed in his father’s footsteps by attending law school and becoming an attorney. Unlike his dad, prominent Alameda County Superior Court Judge Stanley P. Golde, Ivan was not interested in a career on the bench. Instead, he had carved out a niche in the world of professional sports, providing legal counsel to members of the Oakland Raiders Football Club and to baseball great Ricky Henderson. Like Horowitz, Golde enjoyed the media spotlight. According to his web page, he had “done
battle with Nancy Grace on Court TV…and has commentated on the Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson high profile cases.”
Susan liked Golde. He was easygoing and down-to-earth, and the two shared a common background; both had grown up in Oakland and attended the same high school (although Susan’s time there was far more limited than Golde’s). During Golde’s initial meeting with Susan, however, she had made it clear that she was not interested in being represented by counsel. She reiterated that position during the subsequent meeting with Golde and Horowitz, informing the lawyers she was not likely to change her mind.
Still, she listened intently to their advice during a series of additional meetings.
It is not known what finally led Susan to allow the lawyers to take over her case. Perhaps she was growing concerned about her ability to manage her own defense or maybe she sensed that Horowitz and Golde truly believed in her and were willing to do the work necessary to present the case she desired. Media reports claimed that Susan settled on the Horowitz/Golde team after they agreed to present a straight self-defense case and go easy during their questioning of Susan’s youngest son, Gabriel.
Once on board, it was Golde who visited Susan in jail and responded to her countless phone calls. Golde quickly developed a friendship with Susan, but over time even he grew weary of her constant needs. At one point, her demands became so great that Horowitz assigned an office assistant named Valerie Harris, whom he had met at the Scott Peterson trial, to handle Susan’s calls. At the Peterson trial, Harris had earned a reputation as something of a trial groupie because of her constant presence in the courtroom. Dan admired her interest in the case and asked her to join the firm.
When Adam Polk learned that his mother had asked Horowitz and Golde to take her case, he admonished the lawyers to be careful.
“The first time I met Dan and Ivan, I told them, ‘Listen, in two months, you guys are going to be unemployed,’” Adam later explained. “My mother has, throughout her life, for as long I have known her, exhibited a pattern of warming up to outsiders and then completely turning on them.
“I have experienced it my whole life. She is a lady who values control and when somebody else maintains control over her life, I believe she contrives fantasies. Rather than use the word ‘delusion,’ I like to use ‘contrives fantasies’ to gain control of the other people [outsiders].”
In spite of Adam’s warning, the two attorneys forged ahead with their defense of Susan. In September 2005, Dan Horowitz and Ivan Golde filed a motion on her behalf, claiming Susan was the victim of legal maneuvering that was tantamount to bribery and extortion in connection with the civil suit. Horowitz claimed that Bud Mackenzie, the lawyer representing the Polk estate, was trying to put a “squeeze play” on Susan—raising the possibility that the Orinda house would go into foreclosure if she didn’t act. However, when Golde went back to the attorney and offered to put up his own money to halt the pending foreclosure proceeding, Mackenzie reportedly said the house was not in danger.
The motion alleged that Adam Polk was aware that the Miner Road house was not at risk but wanted his mother to believe it was in order to push her to settle. It also claimed that Susan had received veiled threats from an unnamed party that Adam and Gabriel would “testify with great anger and fear about the financial ‘situation’” if she did not agree to settle the suit.
While that motion as well as several others that the Horowitz/Golde team filed were denied, the civil suit was settled shortly thereafter, presumably in hopes that Adam and Gabe would be more friendly to the defense on the witness stand during the criminal case.
With the civil trial moving along, Horowitz and Golde began to hone their strategy for the murder trial. They publicly declared they could win Susan an acquittal at trial. Horowitz told ABC’s Good Morning America that he had no intention of presenting an insanity defense or a battered woman/burning bed syndrome. Susan was a woman who was abused regularly by her therapist husband, and she truly believed Felix intended to kill her the night the two argued in the couple’s guest cottage, the lawyer maintained. Dan Horowitz would argue a straight self-defense case on Susan’s behalf—or at least that’s what he intended to do.
Chapter Twenty-one
SUSAN’S STORY
The temperature had already reached seventy degrees when I arrived at the West County Detention Facility on October 1, 2005, nearly three years to the day after Felix Polk’s murder. I had come to the modern, tidy jail in Richmond, California, at Susan’s invitation for the first in a series of jailhouse interviews for my show, Catherine Crier Live.
Much had happened since Susan’s arrest in the fall of 2002. The most significant was Susan’s about face. For more than two years after Felix’s death, she had publicly maintained her innocence—although she claimed she told her mother and her attorney of her involvement five days after Felix’s death. As the investigation progressed over the years, she eventually changed her story from innocence to self-defense. No one has been able to pinpoint exactly when the change occurred, but Detective Mike Costa later told Court TV’s Lisa Sweetingham that he believed it was sometime in 2003 that he first heard Susan’s new claim.
While Susan had privately detailed the events in the guest cottage to her mother and her then-attorney soon after her arrest in October 2002, the first time she publicly uttered the self-defense argument was in an April 2005 article in the Contra Costa Times. In the article, written by reporter Bruce Gertzman during a time when Susan was not represented by counsel, she insisted that she and her husband were arguing on the night of October 13, 2002, when an enraged Felix came after her with a knife. She fought back vigorously, ultimately killing him in an attempt to save her own life.
A uniformed jail official escorted me to the small interview room where I would meet Susan for the first time. The jangling of keys alerted me to her entrance into the small room on the opposite side of a Plexiglas partition. Her well-groomed appearance surprised me. After nearly three years in jail, she was slender and graceful, even in the baggy prison outfit that hung from her gangly 5′6″ frame. Her once long dark hair was now streaked with gray and cut in a stylish bob. She wore little makeup, just lipstick and white eye-pencil, artfully applied to enhance her beautiful, unblemished skin.
I watched as she slid into a sturdy, metal-framed chair on her side of the cubicle, placing her neatly manicured hands atop the small table we shared. Looking up at me through the divider, she flashed a half smile and then glanced around nervously. Susan and I were about the same age, and during the interview we found several commonalities. Like Susan, I too, had married young. And while I had long since divorced my first husband, Susan had stayed married and raised three children with Felix. She claimed it wasn’t until her fortieth birthday that she realized she could no longer remain in the relationship. Felix was abusive and she wanted out.
I asked Susan what happened that night in the guest cottage. At times, her voice was so soft that I found myself leaning forward to hear her responses through the mesh opening just above the table.
“Well, we had things to talk about, um, and had arranged to meet later that night to have a talk,” Susan began in a quiet monotone. “I got to the door. I knocked. The lights were on, um, around eleven, and it looked like he might have been reading because…he had a book.”
Susan explained that she had a can of pepper spray in her back pocket, which she had purchased at a convenience store in Montana. The clerk told her that one pump would stop a grizzly bear in its tracks, and she was confident the spray would protect her.
I asked Susan about her conversation with Felix. Were they trying to figure out where the two would live? Whether she would stay in the house or return to Montana?
“It was practical,” Susan said. “He [Felix] offered to pay around three thousand dollars a month in spousal support and I wanted to discuss Gabriel, the kids, selling the house or not selling it. I wanted the kids to stay in the house. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money
in a battle. I didn’t think it was worth it because I had been offering for months to just sign papers. It degenerated into an argument. He wasn’t being practical and it just became one of those arguments.”
“How did he get the knife?” I asked.
There was a long pause, as if Susan was searching for an answer. “I really don’t know,” she finally said. “What happened is he came over and backhanded me in the face as he’d done before. I pulled out the pepper spray. Sprayed him. He picked up the ottoman and charged at me with it, then grabbed me by the hair, threw me on the floor, punched me in the face again, and smeared pepper spray into my eyes.
“The next thing I knew, I looked up, and I saw a knife coming down, and I saw it go into my leg. I thought the reason I wasn’t feeling it was because, sometimes, I’ve read, people don’t feel it initially when they’ve been stabbed.
“It was like I flashed on ‘I am going to die. He is going to kill me. If I don’t do something right now, I will be dead.’
“I just thought of the one thing I could do and that was to kick him as hard as I could in the groin and hope at the same time I could get the knife from his hand. I kicked, pulled my leg back as far as a I could and kicked with as much force as I could into his groin, and went for the knife at the very same time, and his hand loosened just enough where I could grab the knife. And, um, I grabbed it, and I felt like I had to say something, and I said, ‘Stop, I have a knife.’
“And then, um, he was going after the knife and I stabbed him in the side, and then he was leaning over, and I think at that point he punched me in the face again, and I reached around and I stabbed him in the back, and then he bit into my hand and bit down as hard as he could. There’s actually teeth, tooth marks on both sides [of my hand] and then he went for the knife at the same time.
“And I thought, well, he was doing what I did and if I loosen up now, he’s going to get it and kill me. And so then I stabbed him again.”
Final Analysis Page 21